Friday, May 27, 2016

Creating a Think Tank: Coaching for Collaboration

One of my favorite things about coaching is the chance to collaborate. With some teachers, my primary role as a coach is that of thinking partner. Many of the teachers I work with have a lot of experience and expertise; they are just looking for a thinking partner to brainstorm with and bounce ideas off of. Even for less confident teachers, this is our goal as we near the end of a coaching cycle. We are leading toward collaboration and interdependence.

Recently, I was Karen’s thinking partner as she planned a writing project for the end of the year. She wanted the project to be both fun and meaningful. She already had ideas about having students create a memoir of sorts – an opportunity to reminisce about their time in fifth grade. We brainstormed together a list of prompts to start students thinking. What was their funniest memory from the year? Their proudest moment? Their favorite book? Then we generated sentence starters to get anyone unstuck in the event of writer’s block. The coaching conversation was a creative and productive time together.

I love the idea that coaching creates think tanks. Whether I’m collaborating with one teacher, a team, or the whole faculty, a lot of good thinking gets done when we put our heads together. Before next school year starts, I think I’ll hang a sign outside my door:



This idea of thinking together and the movement from coaching to collaborating is demonstrated in the GIR coaching model. Whether we work through all the phases to get there or are collaborating right from the start, coaching conversations foster a healthy interdependence that keeps the good thinking going!



“Interdependence is and ought to be as much the ideal of man as self-sufficiency. Man is a social being.”
~Mahatma Gandhi







This week, you might want to take a look at:

A video example of coaching for collaboration:



Get students started with the art of memoir:



Ending the year by planning for next year’s reading workshop:



If you are helping teachers beef up their nonfiction libraries, the Nonfiction Detectives blog is a good resource:



That’s it for this week. Happy Coaching!


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